Top 200 Mario Puzo Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other.”

— Mario Puzo

Featured in: Family Quotes, Loyalty Quotes

2. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”

— Mario Puzo

3. “Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people.”

— Mario Puzo

Featured in: Anger Quotes

4. “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.”

— Mario Puzo

5. “Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.”

— Mario Puzo

6. “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.”

— Mario Puzo

7. “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

— Mario Puzo

8. “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

— Mario Puzo

9. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

— Mario Puzo

10. “Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”

— Mario Puzo

11. “What is past is past. never go back. Not for excuses. Not for justification, not for happiness. You are what you are, the world is what it is.”

— Mario Puzo

12. “In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”

— Mario Puzo

13. “Actions defined a man; words were a fart in the wind.”

— Mario Puzo

14. “Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

— Mario Puzo

15. “A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.”

— Mario Puzo

16. “Falling in love is great but being in love is a disaster.”

— Mario Puzo

17. “I don’t trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.”

— Mario Puzo

18. “Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.- Don Corleone.”

— Mario Puzo

Featured in: Government Quotes

19. “Power wears out those who do not have it.”

— Mario Puzo

20. “The only wealth in this world is children, more than all the money, power on earth.”

— Mario Puzo

21. “Gambling is not as destructive as war or as boring as pornography. It is not as immoral as business or as suicidal as watching television. And the percentages are better than religion.”

— Mario Puzo

22. “Every family has bad memories.”

— Mario Puzo

23. “Friendship and money: oil and water.”

— Mario Puzo

24. “We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.”

— Mario Puzo

25. “There are things that have to be done and you do them and you don’t talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget them.”

— Mario Puzo

26. “Time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty!”

— Mario Puzo

27. “Take the gun. Leave the cannoli.”

— Mario Puzo

28. “Even the strongest man needs friends.”

— Mario Puzo

29. “We don’t know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.”

— Mario Puzo

30. “I find the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading.”

— Mario Puzo

Featured in: Reading Quotes

31. “It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn’t go together except in dire emergencies, if then.”

— Mario Puzo

32. “We are a family, and the loyalty of the family must come before anything and everyone else. For if we honor that commitment, we will never be vanquished-but if we falter in that loyalty we will all be condemned.”

— Mario Puzo

33. “Tell my father I wish to be his son.”

— Mario Puzo

34. “Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright.”

— Mario Puzo

35. “He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser, show me a hero and I’ll show you a corpse.”

— Mario Puzo

36. “Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, “Life is so beautiful,” then nothing else is important. If i can believe in myself that much, nothing else matters.”

— Mario Puzo

37. “Never let a domestic quarrel ruin a day’s writing. If you can’t start the day fresh, get rid of your wife.”

— Mario Puzo

38. “Any man can turn traitor.”

— Mario Puzo

39. “I have always believed helping your fellow man is profitable in every sense, personally and bottom line.”

— Mario Puzo

40. “Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.”

— Mario Puzo

41. “Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.”

— Mario Puzo

42. “Not having to worry about money is almost like not having to worry about dying.”

— Mario Puzo

43. “I like to drink wine more than I used to. Anyway, I’m drinking more.”

— Mario Puzo

44. “Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.”

— Mario Puzo

45. “Some honorable men spend their whole life preparing for a supreme act of treachery.”

— Mario Puzo

46. “Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”

— Mario Puzo

47. “I want to tell you a story. I have no other vanity.”

— Mario Puzo

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

48. “Fredo you’re my older brother and I love you. But don’t ever take sides against the family...”

— Mario Puzo

49. “Love is like the little red toy wagon you get for your Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can’t leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster.”

— Mario Puzo

50. “Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.”

— Mario Puzo